Accelerated charged particles are used in many applications, including radionuclide production in nuclear medicine, free electron light sources, electron microscopy, electron-beam lithography, and materials characterization by particle beam diffraction. Applications using accelerated charged particles are discussed in, for example, “Laser Induced Nuclear Physics and Applications”, Nuclear Physics A 752, 633c-644c, 2005 by K. W. D. Ledingham, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Various methods have been developed for using electromagnetic radiation to accelerate charged particles. Typically, a method for such acceleration involves high intensity pulses of laser light in a configuration wherein the electromagnetic (EM) field takes on both longitudinal as well as the usual transverse oscillation components. A discussion of such methods is given in, for example, “Laser acceleration of electrons in vacuum”, Physical Review E 52, 5443-5453, 1995 by Eric Esarey, Phillip Sprangle and Jonathan Krall, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Transverse components of an EM field normally do not yield effective acceleration of charged particles, since each half-cycle of the field causes particle acceleration in a direction opposite to the acceleration produced by the previous half-cycle of the field. Little or no net acceleration of a charged particle results from the passage of the entire EM field through a spatial region containing the particle.